“A wild mockery, unthinkable in the 20th century.” That is how one young Russian, Pavel Litvinov, the grandson of ex-Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, described the trial in Moscow last week of four young intellectuals accused of anti-Soviet agitation. In a show of defiance not seen for years in the Soviet Union, members of the country’s educated elite challenged the government’s case. Several petitions circulated, demanding “a full public airing” at the trial. Crowds gathered outside the courtroom, yelling, shoving and needling security guards. But Soviet justice pays scant heed to public opinion. After a five-day closed trial, the judge sentenced the three men and a woman to labor camps for terms ranging from one to seven years.
The four—Aleksandr Ginzburg, 31, Yuri Galanskov, 29, Aleksei Dobrovolsky, 29, and Vera Lashkova, 21—were accused of editing and printing manuscripts critical of Communist life with the aid of an emigre organization devoted to the overthrow of the Soviet government. They are part of a growing underground of talented young people who, far from aspiring to join the official Soviet Writers Union, write for one another or for export, publish in typewritten secret journals, and believe that they cannot be creative without at times being critical of the government. Arrested last January, they were in jail for a year before their trial began.
The Kremlin carefully chose the occupants of the 200 or so seats in the Moscow city courtroom. It excluded everyone but half a dozen relatives of the defendants and twelve or more Soviet journalists, whose reports never appeared in Pravda or Izvestia. Outside the courthouse, in temperatures that reached 50 below zero, protesters crowded against police barricades and dashed from door to door through the swirling snow, only to be turned away because they lacked official passes. Police pushed back a thin, weather-beaten man several times until someone yelled: “What kind of disgraceful situation is this? The father of Galanskov cannot even get in to the trial of his own son?” Finally the door opened and the elder Galanskov was allowed in.
Later, the police let the crowd huddle in a stairwell near the courtroom door, where plainclothesmen snapped photos of everyone in sight. Police had replaced the hallways’ dreary lights with new, high-powered bulbs to accommodate the cameramen. One of the main protesters was a balding but erect Soviet general in his 60s who circulated petitions among the assemblage, brandished his cane at a policeman who took his picture. “I’m not afraid of little boys!” shouted Major General Pyotr Grigorenko, who was fired by ex-Premier Khrushchev for protesting “lack of freedom” in the Soviet Union. “I shed blood for this country.”
Showing Who Is Boss. The government tried to make out that it was prosecuting the four defendants not merely for dissenting but also for contacts with the Frankfurt-based émigre organization Narodno-Trudovoy Soyuz (People’s Labor Alliance). Dobrovolsky, who pleaded guilty, testified that Galanskov had given him money to set up an apartment in Moscow for the organization. Galanskov denied it, admitted only to editing the underground journal Phoenix. Ginzburg, who had smuggled out to the West a transcript of the 1966 trial of Writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, denied that his purpose was anti-Soviet. “It is patriotic,” he said, “to die, but not to lie, for one’s country.”
The judge sentenced Galanskov to seven years in a labor camp—the same sentence given Sinyavsky two years ago. Ginzburg got five years, Dobrovolsky, in return for helping to convict the others, only two, and Vera Lashkova, one (which she has already served). After the verdict, Yuli Daniel’s wife and young Litvinov both denounced the trial as a “stain on the honor of our state,” in a joint statement called on Russians to demand the ouster of those responsible for it.
The trial—and all the unusual din that accompanied it—had a double-edged result. On the one hand, it showed that Russia’s rulers still find it necessary to tear off their benign mask of recent years to show the people who is really boss. On the other hand, the events outside the courtroom demonstrated that Russians now have more inclination, and greater opportunity, to speak out against the government.
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